1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic displays, and, more particularly, to a method, apparatus, and system for providing an image preview of a data set.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been various advancements in the area of document creation, image creation and capture technology and processing them in a computer system. Image creation and capture technology includes creating images and/or documents using various applications and capturing images processed by cameras and scanners. Generally, images are created or downloaded onto a computer, such as a Macintosh® computer system, and a user may browse through the various images captured by the camera or the scanner. The images and documents are stored individually and are generally represented graphically using an icon. A user may then browse the icons and view the content of the files represented by the icons by launching applications relating to the files to view the files.
There have been many advances in the storage, display, and processing of the various files, such as documents, images, etc. State-of-the-art computer systems provide for processing a variety of types of documents, such as photographs, database documents, text documents, presentations, etc. Often, these files may be organized on a display monitor or in a folder represented by icons. A computer system may contain a large number of icons that represent various files. These files include pictures, documents, downloaded information, and presentations.
Generally, when a user views various icons displayed on a display, the content of the file represented by each icon may be not readily apparent. At times, a large number of icons may be present on a desktop or in a computer file folder. A user may have to open a number of applications to decipher which files are represented by these icons. Designers have tried to alleviate some of these problems by designing icons of different shapes, which may provide some indication as to what type of document is associated with a particular icon. However, problems still exist with this solution since a user may still not know which document or image is associated with a particular icon or what is its associated file-content. Furthermore, icons are merely graphical signatures that are tagged onto a particular file; therefore, errors may occur where an icon may not correlate to an actual file that it purports to represent. Therefore, a user opening a particular icon may discover that an entirely different document is linked to that particular icon.
Additionally, a user would need to scroll across many icons and open various applications associated with the icons in order to decipher the actual content of the file associated with the icons. This may require various steps, such as finding the appropriate icon, double clicking the icon, launching a particular application, opening a window, examining the image in the window, deciphering the content, then exiting the application and going back to a user interface to view the next icon to be examined. This task can be very cumbersome and could cause various inefficiencies when trying to find a particular document. This process is also very inefficient when going through various icons to determine which documents are represented by the respective icons. Such inefficiencies may reduce productivity and cause a loss of valuable time and effort in processing and/or viewing files.
The present invention is directed to overcoming or at least reducing one or more of the problems set forth above.